All the Things We didn’t Do This Year

It’s the time of the year to take stock of the past and plan for the future. I guess. It doesn’t take too many New Years with kids to, “learn ya real good” that your plans are a framework at best. In the military they say no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Relative to our daily lives and New Years resolutions I’d say the enemy makes contact around the first week of February.

Looking back over 2025 I can tell you things didn’t go as planned. There were so many things I wanted to do that I didn’t or planned to do regularly that we only did once or twice if at all.

At the beginning of the year I planned to make a point to stay in touch with my siblings. I even set the bar for myself super low, like checking in with a text every few weeks. Ask them how that worked out. No really, I need you to ask them because I haven’t talked to most of them since Thanksgiving.

My wife and I made a plan to take several family day trips to state parks and do more family hikes this year. We went to one new state park. Sure, we did actually do more exploring and hiking than we had in years past, but my grand ideas of outdoor family activities were far less frequent than I intended.

Which was a common theme. Since the boys weren’t going to be involved in organized sports in the spring I planned to have a “fishing season” with them. We talked it up a great deal and got geared up for all sorts of fishing – and then barely fished. It rained or someone was sick or things came up and all of a sudden it was 100 degrees and not what you’d call enticing fishing weather.

Blaming not doing something on events outside of your control is tempting too. We were going to have family night around the firepit on fall weekends this year. But it was too hot to have fires for the first nine weeks of the fall and then too rainy and then there were prior commitments.

It’s tempting to play the blame game like this because it’s partly true. But only partly. There are ways we could still have worked some fire nights in there or ways we could have pivoted to having a family night even without a fire but didn’t.

Lack of follow-through is not an uncommon trait in humans.

And it was certainly a theme for me in 2025. This is the part where I talk up 2026 and resolve to do this or that or NOT do this or that, right? Instead of declaring I’m doubly committed to making things happen next year, let me be the first to say I’ve learned from my ways and won’t be making any grand plans.

Or at least I’ll temper my expectations and won’t take them as seriously this year. At least, that’s the plan.